Accellera and Open SystemC Initiative Announce Plans to Unite

New Organization to Benefit System, Software & Semiconductor Industries by Creating Comprehensive Front-End Design Automation Standards

SAN JOSE, CA--Jun 22, 2011 - Today, Accellera and the Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI), two industry organizations focused on the creation and adoption of electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards, announced that they have signed a memorandum of understanding outlining a plan to form a single organization. The new organization will leverage the complementary efforts of both groups to create more comprehensive standards to benefit the worldwide electronic design community, and facilitate efficient collaboration among its members.

"Our new organization will leverage the excellent work of our technical committees to provide a bigger benefit to the electronics industry," said Shishpal Rawat, Accellera chair. "By forming a combined organization, we will be able to accelerate development of system level standards that will move electronic design productivity to the next level."

System, software and semiconductor design activities are converging to meet the increasing challenges to create complex system-on-chips (SoCs). This convergence has brought to the forefront the need for a single organization to facilitate the creation of system-level standards and semiconductor design, and verification standards. The relationship between OSCI's TLM-2.0 SystemC Transaction Level Modeling standard and Accellera's Universal Verification Methodology (UVM™) standard exemplifies the synergy that exists between the two organizations.

"We are taking this significant step to address the future needs of the system and semiconductor design communities," said OSCI chair Eric Lish. "We are excited about the opportunity this presents to our members to improve their design productivity with industry standards that encompass system-level, RTL and gate-level design flows."

The new organization is expected to be in place by the end of the year with a unified set of policies and procedures. Until then, ongoing standards development activities will continue in both organizations.

About SystemC and OSCI
The Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI) is an independent, not-for-profit association composed of a broad range of organizations dedicated to supporting and advancing SystemC as an open industry standard for system-level modeling, design and verification. SystemC is a language built in C++ that spans from concept to implementation in hardware and software. For further information about SystemC and OSCI, visit www.systemc.org.

About Accellera
Accellera provides design and verification standards for quick availability and use in the electronics industry. The organization and its members cooperatively deliver much-needed EDA and IP standards that lower the cost to design commercial IC and EDA products. As a result of Accellera's partnership with the IEEE, Accellera standards are transferred to the IEEE standards body for formalization and ongoing change control. For more information about Accellera, please visit www.accellera.org. For membership information, please email membership@accellera.org.